Topic: ‘In Silico’

The idea of using artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate drug discovery process and boost a success rate of pharmaceutical research programs has inspired a notable amount of activity over the last several years with a considerable number of initiated research collaborations between AI-driven R&D vendors and top pharmaceutical companies in 2016-2017.

A busy beginning of 2018 shows that the area is getting even “hotter” and things start unfolding faster in the emerging “AI for drug discovery” space. Below is a brief summary of some of the most notable events of this year so far:

The type of artificial intelligence (AI) which scares some of the greatest minds, like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, is called “general artificial intelligence” -- the one which can “think” pretty much like humans do, and which can quickly evolve into a dangerous “superintelligence”. There is a notion that it might be invented in the nearest decades, but today we are definitely not there yet. The AI which is making headlines these days is a “narrow artificial intelligence”, a limited type of machine “intelligence” able to solve only a specific task or a group of tasks. It can’t go anywhere beyond specifics of the problem for which it is designed, so apparently, it will not hurt anyone in the nearest time. But already now it can provide meaningful practical results on those narrow tasks, like natural language processing, image recognition, controlling self-driving cars, and helping develop new drugs more efficiently. With the ability to find hidden and unintuitive patterns in vast amounts of data in ways that no human can do, AI represents a considerable promise to transform many industries, including pharma and biotech.

February 6 2018 will be marked in history as the day when an automobile embarked on a million year trip into far space. On that day, Falcon Heavy, the 230ft megarocket, successfully launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, bringing on board Elon Musk’s personal Tesla Roadster with a crash test dummy called 'Starman' strapped into the driver's seat.

"The imagery of it is something that's going to get people excited around the world." says Elon Musk, a guy who literally revolutionized the area of space travel having developed and successfully tested first reusable rockets in the aerospace history, opening new horizons for cosmos explorations.

While advances in aeronautics are making news headlines daily, a much quieter scientific revolution is also happening in the area of “chemical space” explorations -- the one which might soon uncover novel medicines to cure diseases.

In the domain of drug discovery, there can be a world of difference between a computer-generated hit compound, which is predicted to bind well to a drug target and what can be reliably synthesized at scale, or indeed synthesized at all. This discrepancy has been a lingering point of discord between the Discovery and R&D efforts in the chemical industry. Computer-aided drug design (CADD) has become an increasingly valuable tool by providing essential screening data and unique insight into drug action and mechanism, but it does not model the more complex world of chemical reactivity and synthetic chemistry.